Apple - The Great Innovator Or a Bully And a Con?

Check the below article reprinted from ReadWrite.com.  
Apple's glorious "pinch and zoom" patent just got invalidated.  Only a company with the deep pockets of Samsung could pursue the fight all the way to "invalidation", and even after paying Apple about $1 billion awarded by an incompetent jury.Something is profoundly wrong.  Ask yourself how many smaller companies have been put out of business by similar Apple tactics? The irony is that consumers have been bamboozled into believing that Apple is the great innovator on account of these cons.  Was Jobs brilliant at seeing value in other people's ideas and make something of it with brilliant repackaging? Yes absolutely, all the way back to the mid 80's when he ripped off Xerox PARC's mouse, icons and windows UI (Gates and others that saw exactly the same stuff, could also have done the same, but did not "get it" for a few years longer than Jobs).  Unfortunately Apple's deep pockets also allowed it to become a destructive IP bully for which all consumers pay a price.  Small startup innovators cannot defend, they just get put out of business.  The optimist in me likes to think "all cons come to an end", to wit some companies like GM sold junk and lost shareholders value for years but eventually came to their deserved end (unfortunately we also bailed it out and now taxpayers are losing 1/2 their investment thanks to Treasury's decision to unload the stock - but that's another story).

Next time you hear that Apple is king of innovation, remember the story below and ask how many true innovators have been squashed by their con.

Another Apple Patent Gets Smacked Down, And Its 'Thermonuclear War' Becomes Even More Of A Farce

Dan Lyons yesterday

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This time it's the so-called "pinch and zoom" patent getting rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and this is a big deal since that patent was one that Apple used to achieve that huge $1 billion verdict against Samsung in a California kangaroo court last summer.

Now what happens? Does the court in California go back and subtract all the damages that the jury awarded to Apple based on this patent that Apple should never have been granted?

Apple took a big victory lap after that ruling but it's looking like maybe it popped the champagne too early.

The ruling by the USPTO is not final, and no doubt Apple will appeal the decision, but suddenly Apple isn't looking so powerful. In fact, it is looking a bit, well, ridiculous. (And  that's the kind word for it.)

The patent was struck down because the USPTO found prior art. Meaning Apple didn't actually invent the stuff it claimed to have invented. It copied it from others, then went and got a patent on it anyway, and then used that bogus patent to sue rivals.

Worse yet for Apple, this new ruling from the USPTO comes just two weeks after the USPTO smacked down another of Apple's patents, one that related to multitouch and was known as the "Steve Jobs" patent.

I wrote at the time that Apple's "thermonuclear patent war" was a farce. Now that farce seems even sillier.

These Ideas Were Around Long Before Apple 'Invented' Them

User Interfaces, Arrogance and Opportunity

Disclosure
In the interest of full disclosure I'll admit to some personal and painful experience with User Interfaces (UI).  They probably colored my perspective to this day.
The first UI we learn as humans is language which allows us to interface with mom and other humans. In the US in particular, most people learn the "language UI" only once - English.  As an immigrant from Italy in 1970 (before English had became the world's global language) I suffered the cost of confronting my UI (Italian) abruptly obsoleted and I had to waste a whole semester studying English as second language before I could start full speed with my real courses (not an inconsiderable penalty considering that I still completed a BA and MBA in 4 years).

Looking back, then I chose to almost completely abandon using Italian in favor of English (the former I would not forget while the latter is still a work in progress). I distinctly remember that bargain: Pay a price to get something valuable for the rest of my life.  The alternatives were to go back to Italy or to limit my future to an Italian language neighborhood: both were easier, neither had ROI.

The cost of UI changes
I think all UI changes reflect the same ROI calculation I did back then. The fact that, despite all the push for Vista and Win7, XP still has a 70+ % market share, in my view, reflects that same calculus:  Why invest effort and incur the cost of disruption (personal or organizational or both) to change to a UI that does not have a compelling, demonstrable unquestionable advantage?  70% so far say NO.

Furthermore, to follow Microsoft into the promised land we'd have to trash perfectly viable PCs that just happen to have an engine insufficient for the new OS.  It is like GM offering you a car that carries no more people, goes no faster, saves no money and requires you to learn to drive with a joystick sitting backwards and looking at the road through a mirror - eventually you'll like it.

Arrogance as a strategy
Todays' announcement that the miraculously uncluttered, minimalist new-design Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) will not run on XP is the reflection of an arrogance we would not tolerate from automakers.  It's tantamount to GM announcing cars wider than the lanes in our roads, for awesome benefits to be sure, like improved cornering stability, or all passengers sitting in first raw, and replying to our objections with "build new roads" (a "let them eat cake" attitude comes to mind).

In the days when most (low power) cell phones can sport an effective web browser, one has to wonder the necessity of dumping viable PCs just because they cannot run Win7 and IE9 - has anyone heard we are in a recession?  Yet the me-too desire for IE9 will prompt many to "eat cake": buy new expensive hardware with a new OS and IE9 to do no more than an iPhone or Android phone would do.  Arrogance may pay off after all.

Opportunities abound
Arrogance however always carries a price to be paid when the American public abruptly switches to alternate suppliers more responsive to their needs: see the experiences of GM and Toyota, Internet Explorer and Firefox/Chrome, Motorola and HTC/Nokia/et al., United/USAir and Sothwest/JetBlue, and so on.

One would be tempted to add to the above list Microsoft and Linux/Ubuntu, but we cannot.  It may be a sea change in the making with Android (an Ubuntu skin), but is not yet here.  Why after 10 years of Linux has it not happened?  It's not the economy, stupid; it's the UI.  Yes, the UI.

Linux in all its incarnations can run better than XP on old PCs (as on new cell phones) and can deliver equivalent or the exact same applications (through WINE) but pigheadedly keeps coming out requiring the user to adapt to a  new UI. If there were a benefit to that UI change users would do it, but since there isn't they just don't change - 70% market shares says so.

Geeks and Linux fans spend much effort touting the greater elegance and whatever many other strengths, but seem to be totally oblivious to the fact that Toyota can pull customers away from GM and Ford ONLY BECAUSE THE UI IS THE SAME and the technical improvements/advantages require NO learning curve.

In the business parlance of the day the saying goes: OUR (business/product) value proposition is...  That's great because it means we understand that a value proposition is key, but we should strive to phrase it in terms of THE BUYER, not in our terms.  Perhaps: FOR CUSTOMERS THAT WANT X we offer Y that does..  It would set the right frame of mind for OUR mind.

So, in closing here is a thought for all of you innovators out there looking for ideas: Produce a Linux that looks and feels (the UI) identical to XP, so that "XP migrants" have NOTHING to learn, make it run like Ubuntu on old PCs (those obsoleted by Win7), with a minimalist looking IE9-style web browser that requires no new PC and OS (Firefox/Chrome?).

Beware - The window of opportunity is closing fast. Android, a garden open to all, will soon deliver a uniform UI from cellphone-to-tablet and eventually to PCs (as Apple promises from pad-to-phone).  If a new option with an XP-UI appears, it can still capture the transition moment, and you can capture a market, else the UI consistency from phone-to-PC promised by Android will be the David's stone that slays the arrogant Goliath.

Either way it will be the UI, not the power, not the features, not the economy, the UI.

P.S. I loved my birth language UI, I changed it because of the ROI, but cannot forget the price I paid
Ciao
Marco Messina

Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Working with startups I have the good fortune of dealing regularly with highly motivated energetic and imaginative people who feel a drive to change their world. To some the world is the immediate vicinity, to others it is the whole globe, but in all cases they all see themselves destined to make a big difference. Most, not all, hope to be well compensated for their novel contribution and hard work. Even in this specialized group, however, invention, innovation and entrepreneurship are frequently confused. There are standard dictionary definitions of each readily available, but their frequent interplay complicates things. Let's look at how:

Invention (Inv)
An invention is an idea developed by a person, the inventor. To be recognized as such by the US PTO it requires 1. Novelty and 2.Non-obviousness to others skilled in the domain.  Note that there is no reference to usefulness, implementation, results, etc.

Innovation (Inn)
Is the process by which a useful outcome is obtained by a the implementation of either a new idea (an invention) or of an old idea in a new way or under new circumstances.  Note that invention is not  a requirement, but novelty of application, usefulness and most of all implementation are.

Entrepreneurship (Ent)
The activity of an entrepreneur: from its French root it implies starting something, particularly in business, taking risk for the outcome. Only initiative and risk taking a required, however common sense would also recommend a useful purpose that justifies the risk taking.  Neither invention nor innovation are required.  By this definition an entrepreneur could be one who opens a delicatessen selling the same products at the same prices and with the same level of service as the competition. So long as there is excess demand to be met the risk would be compensated by happy customers.  Growing from there would require innovation.

Most founders of startups I run into have some of all of the above. They are risk takers (Ent), they act (Ent) to achieve a useful purpose or meet a need (Inn, Ent) and they do so in a novel way (Inn) sometimes starting from a new idea (Inv), sometimes from a novel reshuffling of an old one (Inn)

With this in mind, some interesting businesses, inventions and entrepreneurs come to mind

Vannevar Bush
Bush in 1945 (yes '45) in an article "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly conceptualized and defined the specifications of a personal information storage, retrieval and sharing machine, the Memex, remarkably similar to a today's  personal computing devices.  Note that he did so before the invention of transistors and ICs that made the digital age possible. Reading the referenced article, you may note that it all depended on photographic data compression.  Today's high density ICs still depend on the same principle, so Bush was correct in his extrapolation of the fundamental technology and only incomplete in the details of the ovolution. This example begs the question of how much do we recognize something as today's innovation only because of short memories.

Zappos
Zappos is frequently and justly touted as having developed a fanatic level of customer service. It is a correct assessment but only relative to on-line retailing. Anyone who dealt with Nordstrom in Seattle around 1970 (interestingly also a shoe retailer in its beginnings), would instantly recognize the same fanatic commitment to service that built their retailing empire. To wit a story reported by the Seattle papers of a sales clerk running out of Nordstrom to buy from a store next door something a customer wanted but not carried by Nordstrom. Without taking anything away from Zappos this example again begs the question of how much do we recognize something as today's innovation only because of short memories.

Cloud Computing
This new holly grail of the information age is a "whole new concept", invention and innovation only to those that began computing in the desktop PC age (the Computing Mesozoic).  Any remaining survivors, Homo Calculans, of the computing stone age (the Computing Paleozoic) will recall IBM's TSO (Time Sharing Option).  In its day a new concept, TSO promised, and largely delivered, ultra-flexible access to computing resources, centrally managed and backed up, capacity seemlessly reconfigured by the Wizards of Armonk to give us, Homo Calculans, ready access (through monitor-less teletype terminals) to the day's "Software Services" (SaS).  The services included pre-Visicalc/Supercalc/Lotus/Quattro/Excel simulation wonders and other similar wizardry.  Then the Federal Trade Commission mandated the end of SaS and a new age dawned. On the carcass of TSO Honeywell, CDC, Amdhal came to feed.  Eventually they succumbed to more nimble raptors: DEC, WANG, IBM-NASD, Prime, who in turn were hunted into extinction by the micro-raptors Apple, the CP/M herd, the Microsoft/Dell/Clones, IBM-PC/DOS and countless other breeds too small to note. And now the CellPhones and Pads are coming.  Few of the species were adaptable enough to come through the ages: IBM, HP and the endlessly adaptable software-jocks that live parasitic lives on any platform. In the end the logic at the foundation of TSO, like a dominant gene survived to see its day again.

We call all this evolution Innovation and Invention for good reason: in all its forms it is always novelty with purpose.  The  true constant, the DNA of it all, is in the entrepreneurs who have that special gene for taking risks with the purpose of doing something useful, to meet a need.  That will not change.

Marco Messina